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Danish teenager guilty of matricide

stabbedA Danish teenage girl stabbed her mother to death after becoming fascinated with violent terrorist videos which she viewed online.

Lisa Borch, who was 15 at the time, was sentenced to nine year in prison for the crime.

The crime was carried out with an Iraqi friend, Bakhtiar Mohammed Abdullah, 29, who was sentenced to a term of 13 years. He will be deported after that.

The pair has appealed against the decision to the High Court.

They were accused of stabbing Tina Rømer Holtegaard at least 20 times in the chest as she slept in October 2014 in the northern Jutland town of Vissel.

During the trial, it was revealed that Borch had accessed Islamist videos, some including scenes of beheadings.

"She has said herself that she sometimes watches Islamic State videos," prosecutor Karina Skou said.

On the night of the murder, the teenager said she watched TV and admitted to watching “something with IS” on her mother’s iPad. The investigation did not determine precisely which videos she had seen.

Asked if the video clips had included beheadings, she said she couldn't remember.

Borch called the police after the murder and reported that she had seen “a white man” running from their house. When police arrived, prosecutors said that Borch would not pull herself away from her computer and merely pointed upstairs toward her mother’s body.

The district court ruled that it was “indisputable” that during the call Borch pretended to give CPR in the bedroom “even though she was actually in the workshop”.

Prosecutors claimed that the pair agreed to kill Holtegaard together. In court, the two blamed each other.

A forensic examination discovered internet searches for mass executions on Abdullah’s laptop. He claimed Borch made them.

"Lisa showed him pictures on her phone of guns and machine guns, but that was not something he was interested in," his testimony read.

The prosecutor said that Islamic radicalisation “had not been a major theme” in the case. "It could very well have been someone who was subjected to something cruel," she said of the video clips.

After the conviction, Borch’s stepfather said that the teenager loved “to talk about IS and their brutal behaviour in the Middle East”. He expressed fears that she could become more radicalised in prison.

Jens Holtegaard, 58, said she became “more and more introverted” in the spring of 2014 but did not get psychiatric help from the authorities “because Lisa was not sick enough”.

In addition to the prison sentences, the two have been ordered to pay a total of 216,000 kroner (nearly €39,000) in restitution to Borch’s siblings and 254,000 kroner (€34,000) to Jens Holtegaard, now a widower. Borch was also stripped of her right to an inheritance.

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